2. No. Lars has been working on new features and improvements. Among the changes he also addressed the memory leaks. According to him there are still a few leaks but nothing compared with the current version. The new mintMenu will come in Daryna.

Antiquexray: It's an ongoing debate. According to me, NO, don't upgrade things unless you know how to fix your system (if it breaks) or else select the packages you want to upgrade and know why you're doing so. That's just my personal opinion though. If you really want to upgrade just avoid dbus, hal, kernel stuff and xorg.. the rest should be safe enough.

Hmm. On the Celena release notes page (http://linuxmint.com/celena.html) it says it's "built on top of Ubuntu Edgy." It should say Feisty. Also, since Gnome just made a big release, I think you should specifically say what version of Gnome is included with Celena.